Updated: Why Republicans Will Ruin Our Democracy
Updated: So, after I finally gave up on the neo-con, we will call him Twit, over at Newsvine after he basically did not admit to anything and wanted me to go away and not bother him with reality. I started to surf around and found another article that Twit seeded/linked to containing, guess who, Ann Coutler. Now she is hating on Global Warming environmentalists. This chick was basically just making stuff up again to support her conservative ideology.
What I found funny is there were about 5 other people commenting on his thread with the same complaint on how their comments were treated by Twit that I was frustrated about. He was doing the same thing to every single person that either countered him or falsified his article — ignoring them or plain out flaming them with hate. But, it wasn’t just him it was many other conservatives just hating away as the liberals were trying to debate with real facts and science. There was about 150 comments and no one got anywhere. The final comment was Twit saying, “Well, if you don’t like it… go somewhere else!” Which is fine, and we are in a free country, but how are we to get anything done if we never interact with the other party?
I will ask again… what are we to do about this extremism? I am so flabbergasted with the amount of blind hate, it just reminds me of the extreme fundamentalists that HATE contrarian religions. You can never win with them, ever.
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This is not an article per se, but more of a communication between all of you out there, and me. This is more of a ranting, if you will, about the adventures of my political awareness project. What I have noticed about life and especially politics is that liberals and conservatives stay in respective corners with little to no interaction. Liberals don’t step up because it is impossible to talk with a conservative, and conservatives don’t debate because they don’t believe in it. My political awareness project is forcing the two parties to debate. Well, maybe it is just me and the neo-cons, but still, I am out there trying to force a little reality down their little neo-con throats.
While I was perusing Newsvine as I always do, I ran across a sarcastic article posted by a staunch conservative that was titled “In Washington, It’s Always the Year of the Rat” written by who else, but Ann Coulter. It was really bad, and I mean really bad. The whole article was based off of lies, fiction, hate and pure spin. There was not one drop of substance. So, I called the guy out who posted the article. What resulted in me calling the guy out is what made me realize why I hate… well, dislike Republicans. Let me explain what happened between him and me — hmm, all of the conservatives on Newsvine.
Here is what I said in response to the verbal diarrhea that Ann Coulter is so pathetically famous for:
I was going to write something about this, but… oh, forget it. This blame game is going to be in existence until we all grow up and learn to be civil. Until we can rise above all the elementary, immature behavior, this non-sense will continue. America’s partisan population divided by an ideological wall of BS will poison any chance of positive change in our world.
This is not far from, “Superman is way tougher than Batman… No way dude, Batman could kick Superman’s butt any day! You shut up! No, you shut up!” I think Republicans and Democrats are both… well, you get the idea.
This was my attempt to create a real discussion between the two oppositions. The end result is these guys started actually arguing over who would kick who’s ass — Superman or Batman. Well, of course I am not going down like that, so I pressed on, but that is what conservatives do. They try to stifle debates, use slight of hand, smoke and mirrors, block investigations and ignore real objective information, basically using anything that will keep them from having to actually debate… oh, the horror! I left one last comment and that stopped the thread, no one came back to answer me.
Is politics just getting worse, or am I just more perceptive now that politics has become a life or death situation? There are so many examples of how conservatives can’t debate, and that they have nothing to say. I have countered many conservative comments and I get nothing in return. It almost seems as though as soon as I show up, nobody comes back to reply. Why have I not had one good debate with a conservative? Is it that they are not good at debating, not knowledgeable, afraid of confrontation? I don’t believe it is any of these.
I believe it is the fact that they have this “knowing” that they are RIGHT, and in every sense of the word. They truly believe that they are the chosen ones, the real Americans, and are completely righteous. I was told by one that he was not interested in bringing conservatives and liberals together, and that he wants the Democrat party extinguished. They want the conservatives to completely rule the nation 100% with no opposition. It is identical to how the radical religious feel towards Atheists or some other opposing belief.
I have seen so many articles that are nearly completely fabricated to support their ideology like the existence of God, and don’t even get me started with the whole Global Warming issue. They actually think that the “environmentalists” have created this concept of humans influencing the climate change to make billions of dollars from it. What?! I comment back with empirical evidence backed up with the scientific method to explain how we are having a significant effect on this warming. They then completely ignore what I wrote and argue something ridiculous with someone else. It is almost as though my comment did not even register with the group. If you are interested here is what I always write concerning this issue:
The belief that we have nothing to do with global warming is absolutely preposterous. I am always going back to this simple fact for people, and I have no clue why no one will admit this…
All of the world’s life forms respiring carbon dioxide is part of a closed system. There can be no net addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere because the amount of carbon dioxide we exhale can’t be greater than the carbon we put into our bodies by eating plants, or eating animals that eat plants. The plants got the carbon from the atmosphere via photosynthesis.
**The reason why burning fossil fuels is a concern is because it is not a closed loop over human time scales. Extracting coal and oil and burning them puts carbon back into the atmosphere that plants removed millions of years ago.**
With this being said, how can we say we are not contributing to this global warming? The next simple fact is that CO2 levels are higher than they have been for the past 400,000 years. See this image!
The reason for this is the closed system. We have released CO2 into the atmosphere that has not been here for millions of years. If we would have never burned fossil fuels, yes, we would still have cycles of global warming with cooling, but we have now introduced a variable (the extra CO2) that has never been there before. So, to say that the earth is just going through its own cycles, and we have nothing to do with it is very dangerous.
Bottom line… WE are contributing!
I have not yet had someone reply to this or even admit that I may be right. I guess the reason for this article is to make the sane, intelligent people of America realize what we are up against. We are fighting against a political ideology that will never be objective, never succumb to reality and never allow fairness and equality. They don’t want us in “their” country. Period! We are the dark side, the Devil that needs to be conquered and annihilated.
So, what do we do about it? How do you even debate with this? How is this country going to heal? As a matter of fact, how is the earth going to heal?
Did you guys see the Al Gore testimony with that neo-con Sen. James Imhoff? I wonder what party he belongs to? Hmmm, oh, Republican! If you missed it here is a clip of Al Gore with James Imhoff. Notice how Imhoff is not only disrespectful and insulting to Gore but he will not address him as Vice President Gore. He calls him Senator Gore. This is also the same James Imhoff, who said he was “outraged” over the criticism of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, since the abused were enemies of the U.S.
Here is another video of the testimony coupled with a comparison to Bill O’Reilly.
Someone please help me understand what we can to about this.
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Obviously superman could kick batmans ass, batman was just a rich dude in a cape, which made for a cool character, but in a fight superman would crush him.
I’m still in no mode for intelligent conversation, caffeine and whatever the hell is in red bull are about all keeping my eyes open.
That reminds me, you’re far more knowledgeable than I when it comes to nutrition, have there been any studies on the long term effects of all these energy drinks that have flooded the market? I generally go the common sense route and assume that anything that can affect you like that must have some negatives, possibly serious. Once in a great while when I simply need to stay awake, long drive or going to work without sleeping, they are useful. I have one maybe every couple months so I’m not terribly concerned for my own well being but I’m curious what they do to people who drink several a day.
Oh and as for debating neo-cons, well I’m not a big fan of stereo-typing but I’ve generally seen the same problem. The fact that many simply dismiss scientific evidence as untrue because its science makes it very difficult to use anything so weak as evidence to prove a point.
Batman would eventually win over Superman… Batman is an ideology not an individual. You can never defeat an ideology, you can always defeat an individual. Does that remind of the Iraq war?
As far as the energy drinks, once in a while is fine. There is nothing in there that causes anything acute. But, anything that causes pseudo-energy like caffeine or Redbull causes a stress response within the body. This causes a release of cortisol, catecholamines and endorphines, although in small amounts can cause damage to cells if used over time in large doses. Like the coffee addicts and redbull fanatics.
That would be the short answer, so yes, you are fine as long as not used too frequently.
The reason there is so little communication (IMHO) is due to lack of education and understanding of a couple of generations. They passed tests. They didn’t learn, they didn’t think. They just passed tests.
Online communication happens when people use the comment boxes. Some people have the misunderstanding that they have to write a lot, or they have to be politically correct. Some just vent and rant whether on subject or not.
I commented on a couple of blogs about this last week, one being focused on networking. Apparently someone was complaining that although she had a lot of hits, no one ever commented on her articles.
I looked at her site. It was a product review site. What’s to comment on? Also, unlike here (hehehe, which I just added to my own site), the comments at the bottom of the article, with live preview, should be another way to make quick commenting easy.
Truthdig (and others) have a very good system to follow comments that some bloggers don’t use. I comment in a lot of places when I surf, but I lose track of my comments if I don’t get an email when someone replies. Many bloggers “assume” you will subscribe and such. Too much trouble. I like the email feature, and when the article winds down, I request removal. It always works well.
But the bottom line advice I liked (and basically already knew) was that to get interaction, you have to give it. I can’t tell you the number of hits from my comments at Truthdig. Look for people who are talking about what you are, reference what you’ve written, use trackbacks if you can.
I’ve seen some newer networking tools I haven’t explored much lately but would like to exploit if I can figure them out. One is Trailfire where it seems I should be able to link a series of articles together, then write something short for my site and provide the Trailfire link rather than all the others.
Other thing I am exceedingly careful to do is link, link, link. I go to the trouble of full links (includes the title attribute). These show in the search engines and Technorati.
Drawing people who are searching on a subject is what will draw readership and hopefully start establishing dialogue.
Perhaps I’m an exception because I used to follow Usenet groups faithfully. Now that’s! dialogue. But Usenet fell away to forums, which apparently has now fallen away to the commenting system.
Perhaps its time to go back to putting links on Usenet and various forums to initiate more dialogue. I don’t know.
But until there is more communication among everyone, change can’t happen and it will simply get worse.
BTW, Wonder Woman will kick both Batman’s and Superman’s asses.
Wow, that was a lot of information. Thanks for the input! So, you would say that our commenting portion of our site gets an A, B, C or F?
Hey cerebral …
Your commenting system is great! Love the live preview. And when I saw that Truthdig had it I went looking at EE for the code. Right there. Didn’t take me long to set up when I figured it out.
I also like the commenting option for non-members. People haven’t gotten used to the newer and more dependable systems that will take you off a mailing list. Only after I had been using Truthdig awhile did I see it really works. On my site, with EE, it appears to be automated too (although I haven’t a clue! as to how it works.)
I confess that I also get hooked up with research and wander through sites where I would comment or would even go back to comment and I lose them. That’s the reason I also like forums and Usenet type groups. The problem is it spreads things out a bit. I think I may try putting links on the forums and start promoting mine a bit.
Hmmm… I guess I should put the links out there too, huh?
But I like commenting better than I like writing articles. At the same time, some of the sites I frequent (the blechy blawgs I call them … law blogs), don’t like non-lawyer comments. Some require sign-in, others edit or filter, and some let you comment but …
How to get dialogue going with attorneys who think we are “the stupid mob?” Doubtful it will happen, but my articles with or without trackbacks and the other methods like Technorati get their attention anyway.
BTW, I just referenced your Iraq Vets Costs article. Hope you like it. I liked the NewStatesman site too. Interesting.
[…] After all my many dealings with the conservative party, I have learned quite a lot about their politics and perspective on the world. I have written about their blind faith and partisan righteousness with what is fact and what is not in an earlier article. Well, I have found something that is humorous on the surface, but once you really let it sink in, it gets quite scary. Where do conservatives go to get there facts about the world? Where else, but Conservapedia! Why is this scary, well after I have done some serious comparing of Wikipedia to Conservapedia, I have found that they are rewriting history to make sure that their manufactured facts back up their manufactured perspectives. Before I get into what the differences are, you ought to know that their slogan is “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia”. […]
Whoa, Batman is an ideology? When did that happen? Clearly I’m concerned with the heart of this matter, actually I just like to have fun side conversations from time to time.
But seriously Batman is an ideology? I’m no comic book buff but what ideology is that? Because if it is then your right, you can never beat an ideology, although Superman might have a chance, as long as that ideology didn’t include kryptonite.
Well, I am going off of the latest movie “Batman the Beginning or Batman Begins or…”. Remember when that guy (Liam Nelson, I think) taught Bruce Wayne about choosing an idea to represent him because a man is mortal but an idea is immortal? He (Liam) was a part of the Shadow Clan or something, they were a movement to remove the evil from the world, and that is why he chose to represent a bat.
All I know is it was from the movie. I am definitely no expert in the field of comics. Didn’t you see that Batman, because it was awesome! I am glad they brought back the whole serious, dark side of Batman. I got real sick of the childish, retarded Batman movies. Anyways, talk to you later.
Aw Damn, I never saw the latest one. I heard it was good. I was always just annoyed at the ads because they switched the batmobile to some weird tank/truck thing. Without seeing the movie it just looked like they were trying to get into the whole SUV craze which bugged me. I’ll have to rent that sometime.
I had a sneaking suspicion you weren’t a big comic book fan but just in case I was wrong I didn’t want to insult you. Yeah most of the other one really were crap, I liked the first one, but then again I was a child when that came out.
Yeah they have made a few good comic book movies of late. Sin City being the first to come to mind. Dark and serious, and its even shot to look like a comic, which makes it much easier to suspend disbelief. 300 was also sort of a comic book movie (same writer actually) and it was supposed to be good,I didn’t see it myself.
Ok I’ll wander off to something more important than Batman. Which makes me think of Wesley Willis and his song “I Whooped Batman’s Ass” if you don’t know Wesley then your missing out on some great schizophrenic rock, literally.
Well, you have to watch the latest Batman movie, it is really good. The reason they got rid of the Batmobile is they wanted to make the movie a lot more realistic in terms of his capabilities. If you don’t have any expectations of how it should look, you will really enjoy the movie.
As far as 300… hell yes it was good!
Schizophrenic rock? I use schizophrenic as a negative description, so I am having some trouble thinking it is something good. The kind of rock I like is Disturbed, Korn, Red, Ra, Linken Park, Evans Blue…
I’ll have to rent it. Thanks.
Wesley Willis was an odd musician who had voices in his head. He’s no longer with us but he had a small cult following of people who simply liked his very odd lyrics. Musically there isn’t much, an acoustic guitar I think. Heres what his last label had to say, oh and thats a Record Label worth checking out, owned by former front man of the Dead Kennedys, Jello Biafra. They carry, Chomsky, Zinn, Greg Palast and many others along with their musical selections that no ones heard of. Good stuff, of course I prefer the Punk Rock so our musical preferences might be a bit different. Your political, I’m surprised you don’t listen to some punk rock. Eh, its just music, to each there own.
http://www.alternativetentacles.com/bandinfo.php?band=wesleywillis